Six years ago, at Adelaide Writers' Week, on a sunny day as promising as a
hot young author's debut novel, Andrew McGahan told the crowd assembled in a
tent by the Torrens that he'd given up on writing.

He didn't know what he was doing at the festival, he said, and he didn't have
another book in him. McGahan was only 31 at the time. He'd made his name six
years earlier with Praise, an artfully raw confessional that sold
50,000 copies and kick-started the Australian grunge genre. Then he'd run his
slacker alter-ego Gordon through another novel, the prequel 1988, and a play,
Bait, which dumped Gordon in the public service for the rest of his
life.

But at the end of the '90s, McGahan had been cut free from the share-house
lifestyle and the social-security payments. He was living with his long-term
girlfriend, Liesje, a vet, and adapting Praise for the screen. He'd left the
bildungsroman behind and started a more ambitious novel about a farmer's
obsession with his land and the paranoia sparked by native-title legislation.
But it didn't work. It was a mess. McGahan was stumped.

"As a kid I'd always wanted to be a writer, but after 1988 I thought, `you
wanted to do this as a kid, but is it what you should do?' There's a line in the
new book: `How dominated can you be by childhood dreams?' At the time of the
Adelaide Writers' Festival, I was saying `that's it, I can't think of anything
else I want to do'. That was quite a low point."

The 37-year-old McGahan who now opens the door of his house in Melbourne's
western suburbs looks much the same as the 25-year-old Brisbane university
drop-out who won the Vogel Award in 1991: sleepy-eyed, barefoot and uncombed at
close to noon.

In a little concrete courtyard crowded with tomato vines, three adopted stray
cats weaving underfoot, McGahan talks at caffeine-fuelled speed, punctuating his
own self-deprecating patter with rumbled laughter and deep, hungry drags on the
rollies he still smokes.

His new book, The White Earth, is the novel he couldn't write back
then. It's an ambitious multi-generational epic about a man and his land,
informed by the native-title legislation that dominated debate in the late '90s.

The story centres on a young boy, Will, who is sent, along with his widowed
mother, to live with his mysterious Uncle John at Kuran House, a decrepit
homestead with a grand past.

Once our dirtiest realist, McGahan weaves mythological strands into his
latest narrative. There are ghosts and visions, even a bloody bunyip. He's
stopped channelling Charles Bukowski. Now, God help him, he seems to be
communing with Patrick White: "This country will speak to you if you listen,"
the uncle croaks at the crux of the story.

McGahan winces: "It's a bit of a saga, isn't it?" He laughs. "I didn't
really want to write a family saga but it seemed the only way of getting into
John McIvor's head. I could not explain why land is so important to him without
going through the history of it all."

The White Earth is the book that has taken McGahan the longest time
to write and challenged him the most. His first books came to him easily,
although the first, a Stephen King-inspired horror story he wrote at 18, remains
unpublished - mercifully, he says.

Legend has it that he wrote the prize-winning first draft of Praise
in two-and-a-half months, although he spent another nine months on the editing.

The next book, 1988, a prequel inspired by the time he spent at a weather
station in the Northern Territory during the bicentenary year, also took a year
to produce.

"Even though the Gordon stories were fictionalised, a lot of the plot comes
from memory - you don't have to make it all up," says McGahan.

"It is harder to create a story from scratch and make it believable. The
first two stories, you know it's believable because you know that, roughly, it
all happened.

"When you're making it up, it's harder to tell if you're going too far or
not far enough. Making up the story takes a long time."

McGahan has been writing full-time for 13 years now. Unlike many writers
trying to make a living, McGahan hasn't diversified - he doesn't do the
residencies, reviewing or teaching that usually supplement the royalties.

"No, no, I just prefer not to do that," he says, shaking his head
vehemently. "Financially, it would be sensible. I don't feel any impulse to be
involved in that side of the writing world. I don't like talking about it, I
have no desire to try and teach it. I make just enough to survive on. Plus,
Liesje (his partner) is a vet. Her wages are quite good. She subsidises my
existence, I suppose. Together we survive relatively well."

He laughs. "Since Praise, I've been bludging around something
shocking."

McGahan was last employed as a mail sorter at the Brisbane dole office that
famously produced two Vogel winners - colleague Darren Williams won the prize in
1994 (Swimming in Silk).

While this suggests that the office had a relaxed work ethic, McGahan was
sacked a week after he won the Vogel.

"The timing couldn't have been better," he says. "I had thought, `Oh my
God, I'm trapped, everyone's here forever, they never sack you,' but then they
did. I got 15 grand for winning the Vogel, which at the time was more money than
I could ever spend."

Praise was one of those novels whose fans mostly divided along
generational lines. Older critics deplored its grottiness; younger fans embraced
its raw picture of share-house life: drinks, drugs and bad sex. It's still in
print, selling around 1000 copies a year, and it's held up far better than many
of the other books once mentioned in the same breath.

Praise is saved by its no-bullshit sense of humour: it's easy to
like a novel where the ingenue role is played by an aggressive barmaid with
eczema, rather than some wispy mystery maiden.

McGahan's parents, wheat farmers from the Darling Downs, were never less than
supportive of the literary efforts of their ninth child, even though that first
book contained the kind of autobiographical detail that could start any parent
twitching.

"I took the line and they took the line that a lot of it was fictional and
we didn't go into detail about which bits were and which bits weren't," he
says.

"I did tell them I wasn't on heroin any more. I was never on heroin anyway;
I only had it a few times."

McGahan broke away from the autobiographical with his crime novel, Last
Drinks, published in 2001. He wrote it as "a really lightweight genre
piece". But his story, set against the background of the Fitzgerald Commission,
attracted rave reviews for its shrewd navigation of corruption and
alcoholism.

It won the prize for the best first crime novel of 2002 at the Ned Kelly
Awards for Australian Crime Writing, and it was shortlisted for both The
Age and The Courier-Mail book of the year fiction prizes.

But don't try to get McGahan to praise his own books: "I wished I'd just
written a novel about Queensland and alcohol and I got really annoyed at having
to keep this crime plot going and wrap it all up at the end. I think I did it
quite clumsily."

Last Drinks explores government corruption and The White Earth gets
to grips with native title - but McGahan says he's not a political animal.

"If I'd bothered enrolling for the vote when I was 18, I probably would have
voted for Joh (Bjelke-Petersen, the former Queensland premier)," he admits.

"I'd just come from the country, the National Party was God."

He only discovered his inner outrage about corruption retrospectively, while
researching the book.

As for native title, he says he's more interested in the paranoia about land
grabs than in the legislation itself: "They were literally out there saying
you'll lose your backyard, your football stadiums, your beaches: the hysteria
was so high that it did lead a few years later to the whole One Nation
thing."

McGahan pauses when pressed on his own opinions: "We-e-ell, my sympathies
were with the Wik judgement - but the book's not saying much about native
title."

There are few autobiographical fragments in The White Earth: the
Darling Downs landscape comes straight from McGahan's childhood, and he once
watched his father's harvester go up in flames, an apocalyptic image he borrowed
for the opening chapter. His narrator Will's undiagnosed ear disease was his
own, an infection that rendered him almost deaf in his right ear at the age of
14.

But both of his parents, he hastens to add, are alive and well and living in
Brisbane.

During his university days, McGahan fell in love with the idea of the
hard-living, hard-drinking writer.

But when he wrote his crime novel, Last Drinks, his research into alcoholism
took the shine off the boozy writer image.

"I was a much heavier drinker in those days. And I was wondering `am I an
alcoholic?' I was thinking 'why do I drink? What's the point of it all?'

"In the end, I became disenchanted with alcohol and am drinking less than
ever, and also realised I wasn't close to being an alcoholic.

"I was drinking almost for image, not because I had a desperate need for
alcohol, just because I liked the idea of being a heavy drinker. Once I realised
that, it took the fun out of drinking."

He's even given up Scrabble, the game alter-ego Gordon plays obsessively in
his first two books.

When I last interviewed McGahan nine years ago, he was playing games against
the computer every day.

Then he read Word Freak, Stefan Fatsis's book about the world of
competitive Scrabble.